2. Ghost
TWO
GHOST
Five days I'd been lying to myself. I knew it.
I'd done what I always did. Club business, the rhythm of the compound, the steady machinery of a life built on routine and purpose. Church on Monday. Routes, Jackals, territorial friction. I sat in my chair, said what needed saying, kept the rest locked down.
I'd written the report for Angel. Brief, factual. Stone's daughter was in the bar Friday night. I assessed the situation. She left without incident and no follow-up required.
I hadn't mentioned our conversation or the way she'd looked at me and the way the ground under me had shifted a little that night.
That part didn't make it into the report.
On Wednesday night I was behind the bar because the evening had fallen apart.
Hank was out with a bad back. Bree had the night off with Hawk.
Evie had been holding the place alone and I'd sent her home at nine because the bar was dead enough for one person.
The truth was simpler than any of those logistics.
I'd rather pour drinks than sit in my room with a silence that used to be comfortable and now felt like a room with a wall missing.
The door opened at quarter past nine.
It was her, and she was alone.
No friend, no reason to be in this bar that she could explain to anyone. She stood in the doorway, her vision adjusting, scanning the room. Her gaze tracked across the bar and I saw the exact second she saw me behind the bar.
Her face changed. The expression of a woman who'd been afraid she was making a mistake and had just discovered she wasn’t. Or maybe I was just hoping that was what she was thinking.
She walked to the bar and sat on the same stool she'd sat on five days ago.
"You're behind the bar tonight."
“Yeah, everyone’s out tonight."
"So you're the bartender."
“More like I'm the VP who can pour a beer."
She gave me the smallest smile, still guarded and held in check, as if she'd decided that smiling too much would give too much away.
She was wearing jeans, a leather jacket, her dark blonde hair loose tonight, falling past her shoulders.
I noticed the line of her throat and then caught myself noticing but still didn't look away. It wasn't subtle.
I poured her a beer without asking. Set it on the bar and the six inches of wooden bar top between her hand and mine burned like heat off a stove.
"You really shouldn't be here," I said. Same words as Friday. They meant something entirely different now and we both knew it.
"I know."
"This time you don't have a friend to blame it on."
Her eyes held mine. Dark, steady, the eyes of a woman who'd driven an hour to sit on an enemy barstool for the second time in a week, alone, and was looking at me with a directness that made my hands unsteady. "I know that too."
Silence. The jukebox played something slow. The sounds of the few people in the bar tonight were muffled into mere background noise. The world went on being ordinary while the air between us pulled tighter with every second she sat there.
"Why did you come back?" I asked.
She looked at me. Through the bar, through the quiet, through twenty years of walls I'd built so carefully I'd forgotten there was anything behind them.
"Because you let me stay the other night."
I should have sent her home. That was the moment. With her beer sitting on the bar and her gaze taking me apart with a patience I'd never seen turned on me, that was when a smarter man would have said go home, Lola, and don't come back. I knew it and she knew it.
Neither of us moved toward the door.
The bar emptied slowly as closing time came. Truckers left. Razor finished his game, glanced at us, shook his head and said nothing. He disappeared through the back corridor. I heard his boots, then silence.
We were alone.
I came around the bar. I didn't decide to do it.
My body made the decision my brain had refused for five days.
I came around the end of the bar and stood in front of her, close, closer than I'd been to anyone in longer than I wanted to think about.
Close enough to see the shift in her breathing when I entered her space.
She didn't move back. She turned on the stool to face me, her knees brushing my thighs, and looked up at me. Half challenge, half surrender.
The age between us was visible up close.
Fourteen years. The lines carved into my face that she didn't have, the years and miles written into my skin, the scarring on my knuckles.
She was twenty-seven and looking at me with a want she wasn't trying to disguise.
I was forty-one and I hadn't felt want like this in so long that the force of it now, standing between her knees with her face tilted up to mine, made my hands shake.
"This shouldn’t happen," I said. My voice came out rough, scraped raw.
"I know."
"If your father finds out..."
"I know that too."
She reached up and put her hand on my jaw and moved her fingers slowly downwards.
Her palm was warm. Her fingers curved against my cheek, her thumb on my cheekbone, holding my face with a steadiness that said she knew exactly what she was doing and had chosen to do it anyway.
The touch was the first deliberate human contact I'd felt in longer than I wanted to calculate.
It landed like a kicked door. A room I'd kept locked for two decades.
I kissed her.
Not gently and not carefully. I put my mouth on hers and the nothing I’d been living inside caught fire.
Her lips parted and I took what she was offering, my hands finding her waist, pulling her off the stool and against me.
She came hard against my body, her fists knotting in the front of my shirt, and the sound she made against my mouth was raw, unguarded, the sound of a woman who'd spent five days holding herself in check and had run out of reasons. I knew that feeling only too well.
I walked her backward through the STAFF ONLY door. Down the corridor between the bar and the lodge, dim, narrow, empty. Her back found the wall and I pressed into her, one hand in her hair, the other gripping her hip, and I kissed her with a desperation that should have scared us both.
It didn't frighten her. She kissed me back with the same force, her tongue sliding against mine, her hands dragging my shirt up, her fingers on my stomach, my ribs, my chest. Her touch was searching, urgent, the touch of a woman who wanted to know what she'd find underneath the quiet and was done waiting to discover it.
I pulled her jacket off. She yanked my shirt over my head.
Her hands spread across my bare chest and her fingers found the scars.
Old, military, the record of a life spent in places where people tried to kill you.
She didn't flinch from them. She pressed her mouth to the scar below my collarbone, her lips hot against the raised skin, and her mouth on that old wound sent my hips forward against hers.
"Lola." Her name came out wrecked.
"Don't stop." She pulled back just enough to look at me. Then her hand came up and gripped my jaw, hard, turning my face toward hers when I would have buried it against her neck.
She couldn't have known what she was doing.
Couldn't have understood that what she'd just demanded, her hand on my face forcing my eyes to hers, was what I'd spent twenty years refusing to give anyone.
Be here. Be present. Be seen. I'd spent my adult life making myself invisible, existing in the margins where nobody looked.
This woman had her hand on my jaw and her eyes locked on mine and she was refusing to let me vanish.
I pulled her shirt over her head. Unhooked her bra with one hand, a skill I hadn't used in years. She was gorgeous. Full, curved, and soft, her skin warm under my palms. I cupped her breasts, my thumbs dragging across her nipples, feeling them stiffen under my touch.
She arched into me, her head falling back against the wall, her hips rocking forward.
I bent my head and took her nipple into my mouth, sucking, circling with my tongue, and the moan she let out echoed off the walls of the empty corridor.
Her fingers dug into my shoulders, pulling me closer, her body pressing against mine with an urgency that matched my own.
I unfastened her jeans. Pushed them down her hips, her underwear with them.
She kicked them off while I worked my belt open.
She watched me, breathing hard, her back against the wall, her body bare in the dim light.
She watched me steady. Unafraid. Her brown eyes tracked every movement of my hands. My chest ached for more.
I lifted her. Her legs locked around my waist, her arms around my neck, her back braced against the timber. I held her there, one hand under her thigh, the other gripping her hip. Her face was inches from mine. Flushed, open, lips swollen, chest heaving.
She was twenty-seven and burning alive. I hadn’t burned in so long I’d forgotten the temperature. The fourteen years between us existed in the contrast of my scarred hands against her smooth thighs, in the control I was losing and the fearlessness with which she was taking it from me.
"Look at me," she whispered.
I was already looking. I couldn't stop.
I pushed into her.
Her breath caught. Her mouth fell open. She was wet, ready, tight around me in a way that blurred my vision.
I sank into her slowly, feeling every inch, feeling her body stretch to accommodate me, feeling her fingers dig into the back of my neck as the fullness registered.
She made a sound, low, broken, and her head dropped against my shoulder and I held still, buried inside her, letting her adjust.
Then she lifted her head. Eye to eye, her face inches from mine, her body wrapped around me in a dim corridor between the bar and the clubhouse.
"Now," she said.
I moved. Deep, controlled strokes that made her gasp with each one.
My hand gripped her thigh, holding her up.
My other hand was flat against the wall beside her head.
Her back slid against the timber with every thrust. She held my gaze the entire time.
Every other woman I'd been with had closed her eyes at some point, retreated into sensation, let the moment become private.
Lola watched me come apart for her, and the exposure of it, the raw vulnerability of being seen while I was this far gone, broke open a part of me that wasn't going to close again.
I wasn't just inside her. She was inside me. Behind the walls, underneath the silence, in the place I’d kept empty because filling it meant admitting I wanted things and wanting things was a liability.
She was there now. Looking at me with those dark eyes, her body gripping mine, her breath coming hard against my mouth, and the truth landed clean.
This wasn't a woman I was going to forget.
This wasn't a night I was going to file away.
She'd found me in the corner of a dark bar.
She'd refused to look away. I was never going to recover from it.
The rhythm broke. I drove into her harder, faster, and she met me, her hips rolling to match mine, her breath coming in short, sharp sounds against my lips when she pulled me in and kissed me mid-stroke.
I shifted my grip, lifted her higher, changed the angle. The next thrust made her cry out, loud, her nails raking down my back, her body shuddering.
"There," she gasped. "Right there, don't stop…fuck…”
I kept the angle. Relentless. Feeling her tighten around me, feeling the tremor building in her thighs, in her stomach, in the arms locked around my neck.
I reached between us, pressed my thumb against her clit, circled.
She came apart. Body clenching around me in waves.
A cry that bounced off the corridor walls.
Her face changed. Pleasure wrecked her. Her eyes finally closed. She let go.
I followed seconds later. The orgasm hit me hard enough to buckle my knees, a rough, guttural sound buried against her neck, my hips stuttering as I came inside her. I pressed her into the wall, both of us shaking, both of us breathing like we'd been underwater.
I held her. Her legs still locked around me, her breath warm against my skin. Her heartbeat hit my chest. Rapid. Then slower.
I lowered her gently. Her feet found the floor. She leaned against the wall, her eyes half closed, her lips parted. For one second her gaze held that same fierce heat, like I was something she'd found that she hadn't known she was searching for.
Then reality arrived. Quiet. Cold. Frost over both of us.
She bent down. Picked up her clothes. Dressed quickly, efficiently, not looking at me.
Her not looking at me was physical. I pulled my shirt on.
Buckled my belt. The corridor was narrow enough that we were still close, our shoulders almost touching, the warmth of her body reaching mine through the cool air.
"This didn't happen," she said. Her voice held. Her hands didn't.
"No," I said. "It didn't."
She looked at me. One last time, her gaze holding mine in the dim light, and everything she wasn't saying was visible in them. The same thing I wasn't saying.
"Goodnight, Ghost."
She walked through the bar, out the front door. Her car started. She drove away. The sound faded into the highway and then there was nothing.
I stood in the corridor. My back against the wall where her body had been thirty seconds ago. The timber was still warm. I could smell her on my skin.
I’d built a life out of silence and margins.
Watching from edges, staying unseen, because invisible men survived and visible ones got destroyed.
I'd watched Angel fall for Callie and said nothing.
Watched Hawk break apart over Bree and held the pieces until he could hold them himself.
Watched Duke, Doc, Rook, each of them walking into something I understood from the outside and never expected to feel from the inside.
She’d held my face and made me look at her. And I had. And everything behind my eyes that I'd kept hidden for two decades had been right there on my face and she'd seen every bit of it and she'd wanted me anyway.
I locked up the bar and went to my room. I lay in the dark processing what just happened.
Something structural had broken. The kind of break that changes the shape of what's built around it, that lets the air into places that had been sealed so long I'd forgotten they existed.
I didn't want them sealed again.